Quote Originally Posted by Koga No Goshi View Post
Dude.... sub prime lenders. Sub prime meaning less than prime. You go to your normal bank where you do checking and savings, and they would check your income and credit and expenses before giving you a loan.

Subprime: we give loans to people who really shouldn't have them. In fact lots of times we don't even check the numbers!

Subprime should not have even existed, if there had been regulation. Or it should have been MUCH more strictly structured in how it could give out loans to people who only marginally qualified. It most certainly should never have allowed any old company to give out loans and then pawn them off.

This was the banking equivalent of "convenient store medical treatment." With no one checking credentials or doing blood tests or anything. And it had predictably similar results.
That's exactly what happened. In fact, I want to share with you a simple stick figure play of how the entire thing started.

http://www.slideshare.net/guestd5ab5...ubprime-primer (A few bad words, but I think it's pretty good. My econ 351 professor takes credit for this. A class full of juniors and seniors found it pretty funny).

Anyway, I don't really care about the ideological aspects of the bailout. At the end of the time is it worth putting up a possible 700 billion to save the entire broad economy while opening up the possibility to actually make cash in the long term or do we say "screw this" and let everyone fail? I'd go with the former. I'm not sure many of you really understand how much some of these companies are intertwined in the overall economy.